Contemporary politics, local and international current affairs, science and extracts from the Queensland Newspaper "THE WORKER" documenting the proud history of the Labour Movement.
Truth never damages a cause that is just ~ MAHATMA GANDHI

Thursday, 8 June 2017

Finkel gives Turnbull a chance to end climate wars but policy may explode on impact

It really is extraordinary.
When Labor introduced a carbon price after the 2010 election,
seemingly every major business interest group with political clout
either quibbled, hid in their bunkers, or lined up against it, and
helped Tony Abbott sink it.
Now, only a few years later, a stunning reversal.
Having fathomed the consequences of engineering not a solution but,
instead, a damaging policy vacuum, the very same stakeholders (minus the
Minerals Council, which apparently lives to scrap) are now lined up
screaming for certainty.
You’d laugh if it wasn’t so serious.

It’s also hard to know whether to laugh or cry when you hear senior players in the Coalition
– precisely the same mob who went on Abbott’s and Peta Credlin’s “axe
the tax” frolic with gay abandon – now observing in Churchillian tones
that now is time for the parliament to come together to solve
Australia’s energy crisis.

There is nothing particularly consequential about now. Now is just an
arbitrary moment in time that happens to suit the current political
imperatives of the Turnbull government, which needs to govern, not
wreck.
Actually, the time for the Australian parliament to come together and
legislate sensible climate and energy policy was a decade ago.
The dysfunctional conditions we are seeing now, our oft invoked
energy crisis, the surging power bills, didn’t just fall out of the sky.
It’s not some tragic happenstance visited arbitrarily on the country.
It is the direct product of our toxic, dysfunctional, winner-takes-all politics. What politics has sown, we now all reap.
So let’s do ourselves a really big favour and cut the crap.
Perhaps if we can all cut the crap we have some prospect,
collectively, of rising to the challenge of fixing the problem. Within
the next 24 hours, the chief scientist, Alan Finkel, is going to give
the Turnbull government an option for ending the climate wars.
He’s going to recommend a new low-emissions target for the
electricity sector. Officials say Finkel will recommend the target be
set at 0.7 tonnes of carbon pollution per megawatt hour.

Australian politics, right now, is being asked to find its hollowed out, battered and denuded centre.

In the absence of detail about how the putative scheme would be
designed and function, and what complementary policy measures would be
required to ensure Australia meets its Paris emissions reductions
targets, this figure doesn’t give us a whole lot of insight.
The details will matter. The details will tell us whether the scheme
is workable or risible, and the details will also determine whether the
new friends of sensible climate policy in the business community are
prepared to go the distance in supporting policy change, or whether they
dissolve into a petulant puddle of self-interest.
But, as a working concept, a potential way forward, the LET is a start.
And promisingly, rather than running a mile, the rational end of the
Turnbull government is showing every sign of knuckling down to have the
fraught internal conversations that will be required to land the policy.
The energy minister, Josh Frydenberg,
has been on the phone constantly this week to colleagues naturally
inclined to cause trouble, and to stakeholders – pushing out business
voices favourable to a LET or, at least, to the theory of an LET.
The objective of this initial framing exercise is simple: to ensure Finkel doesn’t explode on impact.
Assuming Finkel doesn’t explode on impact and Frydenberg is
fleet-footed enough to emerge with some room to move in design and
implementation, the next critical phase of the transaction is
bipartisanship.
The government could adjust its energy policy with help from the
crossbench but that doesn’t solve the certainty problem. Until the
energy sector gets a genuine major party truce, until it buys what
politics is selling, it will keep its wallet firmly in the back pocket,
given a federal election looms sooner than we all want.
Hence the outbreak of nouveau statesmanship this week, from tribal characters like Scott Morrison, who only five minutes ago was waving around a lump of coal in the parliament, as if that was some sort of great insight.
Labor faces some big choices. Nouveau statesmanship being the
designated order of business, the Labor leader has now written to the
prime minister, saying he’s Bill from Maribyrnong and he’s here to help.

Speaking to reporters on Thursday, Bill Shorten’s “help” was being weighted with the odd kidney punch.
Shorten was entirely happy to help Malcolm Turnbull face up to the
trolls in his own party room. He was happy to help the prime minister
with his Abbott problem.
In truth, that didn’t sound like much help. It sounded like a volley of cheap shots.
You can hardly blame Labor, having been the recipient of brutal,
entirely cynical treatment on climate policy, for wanting to extract a
pound of flesh on the way through.
Quite apart from managing reasonable human frustration, Labor also
ultimately has to deliver for its own, progressive constituency.
While Shorten is pragmatic enough to want to deal on this question
and consign the horrors of carbonageddon to history, he knows voters
won’t mark Labor up for settling for a nonsense policy. There is only so
much room to move.
So if the government wants a durable policy result, it has to think
not only of overcoming its considerable internal challenges – Tony and
the trolls – but the bigger challenge of emerging with a policy worthy
of bipartisan support.
It has to have the courage of carving out some actual middle ground,
and it has to do it on an issue that has cost Turnbull the party
leadership in grim times past.
So where are we left with all this?Australian politics, right now, is being asked to find its hollowed out, battered and denuded centre.
The Finkel process is looming as a test not only of whether our
elected representatives can fix a specific problem but whether our
political system still functions in the interests of the voters.
No pressure guys.
We are all here.

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About Me

I was inspired to start this when I discovered old editions of "The Worker". "The Worker" was first published in March 1890, it was the Journal of the Associated Workers of Queensland. It was a Political Newspaper for the Labour Movement. The first Editor was William "Billy" Lane who strongly supported the iconic Shearers' Strike in 1891. He planted the seed of New Unionism in Queensland with the motto “that men should organise for the good they can do and not the benefits they hope to obtain,” he also started a Socialist colony in Paraguay.
Because of the right-wing bias in some sections of the Australian media, I feel compelled to counter their negative and one-sided version of events.
The disgraceful conduct of the Murdoch owned Newspapers in the 2013 Federal Election towards the Labor Party shows how unrepresentative some of the Australian media has become.